Day: June 6, 2011

As in, properly back. I was actually back last weekend but it took me a week to stop crying about the fact that I wasn’t in Spain anymore and gear up to get back into work, specifically finishing the first draft of Backpacked.

Yes, that would be the book that’s supposed to out in September.

Cutting things close, I know.

Speaking of which, I found myself wondering yesterday just what I’m going to do about Backpacked‘s paperback edition and Amazon.co.uk. As I talked about in this post, it no longer seems likely that it will appear on there, and if it does it will probably remain “Available from these sellers” which is essentially out of stock. Apparently I was lucky with Mousetrapped, which appeared available on Amazon.co.uk only days after publishing it, but despite doing everything the same way (i.e. signing up for CreateSpace’s Pro Plan) Mousetrapped‘s second edition and Self-Printed have both failed to.

(To overcome this with Mousetrapped, I updated the original edition with the second edition’s files. So if you order it, you’re getting the new one, no matter what. Self-Printed is only available from Amazon.com.)

Worrying too much about my paperbacks was a mistake I made with Mousetrapped. Sales-wise, they’re not that important. As of today (June 5th), I’ve sold 5,557 copies of Mousetrapped. Of these, only 542 were paperback editions and of those, only 212 were under the Pro Plan. Considering these include books sold from the likes of The Book Depository and Barnes and Noble as well (although I don’t get told how many were sold from each one), I think I can conclude that my Amazon.co.uk sales can’t be more than 100-150, or about 3% of all copies sold. Hardly enough to be getting my knickers in a twist. In fact when you take into consideration how much time, effort and money it takes to produce them, why bother with paperbacks at all?

Mmm… paperbacks.

First, I love books and so a physical book is a must for me. Second, some people – myself included – will only read physical books, and what I call the “on publication buyers” – the people who’ll buy your book when it comes out, i.e. family, friends, fans, loyal readers – generally are looking for paperbacks. Third, you can’t sign an e-book and signed books are like designer shoes to book lovers, and they also make great presents. So paperbacks it is.

So what to do to make Backpacked available to these people, without having to convince them to order from Amazon.com? How about selling them myself, through my website? Well, I did that with Mousetrapped and I later considered it a mistake. I had to order in stock I wasn’t sure I could sell (which is the complete opposite of the point of POD), I was constantly worried I wouldn’t have enough of it to fulfill a sudden order, and I didn’t really charge enough for them to make a profit worth all the effort. But it was nice to be able to sell signed copies to people, and I did get a lot of orders. I thought about it long and hard: how could I sell Backpacked through a website of my own, but without the stress, headaches or financial risk?

This is what I came up with:

Between July 1st and August 31st, there’ll be a website where you can go and pre-order a paperback copy of Backpacked. Payment will be at time of ordering and via credit card or PayPal. Your copy will be signed and personally inscribed if you want, and – although this is subject to change once I get the physical qualities of the book locked down – about €15 (£13 or $21, very ish) including shipping worldwide. (There will also be something coming with it – free – that hopefully will sweeten the deal slightly, but I’m not revealing what that’ll be just yet.) You’ll be able to cancel and get a refund up until a certain date; after that date, you’ll incur a cancelation fee (because I’ll have already ordered the book). Your copy will be shipped around mid-September and before the paperback is available for general sale. Behind the scenes, I’ll collect the pre-orders and just order the exact amount of paperbacks once I close the pre-ordering window a couple of weeks before publication. When they arrive, I’ll sign, inscribe and ship them, and that’s that.

Everyone’s happy, presumably.

The beauty of this if that even if I get just one or two orders, I’m not out of pocket and I’m not stuck with stock I mightn’t be able to sell. Anyone who wants a paperback and lives in a country that Amazon.com charges astronomical shipping charges to send books to will be able to get a copy at a reasonable price – and a signed copy at that – and if you’ve run out of Christmas present ideas, [cough, cough] here’s the solution.

P.S. A little birdie (read: Google Alerts) informed me that a newcomer sent to my blog for self-publishing advice got the impression that all I was doing was plugging Self-Printed. Lady, that would be because the book came out three weeks ago, and two weeks ago I went on holidays. But should anyone else get that impression, I’ve installed a quick link – see the button above right – that takes you to a full chronological listing of all my self-printing blog posts.

UPDATE: As Marcus pointed out in the comments below, you can “sign” e-books. I use the quotation marks because while you can put a personally inscription and maybe even the computer code equivalent of your signature, you can’t put a pen to paper. You can’t sit at a desk, meet and greet readers and ask them there and then what they’d like you to write, and then with a pen on paper write it on the title page for them. You can’t then go home and occasionally pull out the book and think, “Michael Connelly touched this!” like I do with my personally inscribed limited edition of Nine Dragons. (Not every day… but most!) And so while one day I will almost certainly succumb to reading the things, I will never “sign” an e-book.